Val Mcdermid - Blue Genes

He loved the tale, I could tell. Especially the bit where Richard walked through the door with the takeaway and the Celtic cartoon characters. It was a short step from there to outlining Dan Druff’s problems with the saboteurs. Dennis sat back again, linking his hands behind his chair with the expansive air of a man who knows his supplicant has come to the right place.

‘Flyposting, isn’t it?’ he said as if delivering a profound pronouncement.

‘Well, yeah, that’s one of the problems they’ve been having,’ I said, wondering if his spell behind bars was blunting Dennis’s edge. I had already explained that the Scabby Heided Bairns’s posters had been covered up by other people’s.

‘No, that’s what it’s all about,’ he said impatiently. ‘This whole thing is about staking out territory in the flyposting game.’

‘You’re going to have to give me a tutorial in this one, Dennis,’ I said. Ain’t too proud to beg, and there are times when that’s what it takes.

Happy that he’d established his superiority despite his temporary absence from the streets, Dennis filled me in. ‘Illegal flyposting is mega business in Manchester. Think about it. Everywhere you go in the city, you see fly posters for bands and events. The city council just don’t bother prosecuting, so it’s a serious business. The way it works is that people stake out their own territory and then they do exclusive deals with particular clubs and bands. The really clever ones set up their own printing businesses and do deals with ticket promoters as well. They’ll do a deal with a club whereby they’ll book bands for them, arrange the publicity and organize the ticket sales at other outlets. So for a band to get on and nail down a record deal, best thing they can do is get tied in with one of the boss operators. That way, they’ll get gigs at the best venues, plenty of poster coverage on prime sites and their tickets get sold by all the key players.’

‘Which costs what?’

Dennis shrugged. ‘A big slice, obviously. But it’s worth it to get noticed.’

‘And you think what’s going on here is something to do with that?’

‘Must be, stands to reason. Looks like your lads have picked the wrong punter to do business with. They’ll have chosen him because he’s cheap, silly bastards. He’s probably some kid trying to break into the market and your band’s getting his kicking.’

I made the circular gesture with my hand that you do in charades when you’re asking the audience to expand on their guesses. ‘Gimme more, Dennis, I’m not seeing daylight yet,’ I said.

‘He’ll have been papering somebody else’s sites. If the person whose site he’s been nicking doesn’t know which chancer is behind the pirate flyposting, he’ll go for the band or the venues the chancer’s promoting. So your band are getting picked on as a way of warning off their cowboy promoter that he’s treading on somebody else’s ground.’

I understood. ‘So if they want to get out from under, they need to get themselves a new promoter?’

He nodded. ‘And they want to do it fast, before somebody gets seriously hurt.’

I gave a sardonic smile. ‘There’s no need to go over the top, Dennis. We’re talking a bit of illegal flyposting here, not the ice-cream wars.’

His genial mask slipped and he was staring straight into my eyes in full chill mode, reminding me why his enemies call him Dennis the Menace. ‘You’re not understanding, Kate,’ he said softly. ‘We’re talking heavy-duty damage here. The live-music business in Manchester is worth a lot of dosh. If you’ve got a proper flyposting business up and running with a finger in the ticket-sales pie, then you’re talking a couple of grand a week tax free for doing not a lot except keeping your foot soldiers in line. That kind of money makes for serious enforcement.’

‘And that’s what my clients have been getting. Skinheads on super lager breaking up their gigs, their van being set on fire,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m not taking this lightly.’

‘You’ve still not got it, Kate. You remember Terry Spotto?’

I frowned. The name rang vague bells, but I couldn’t put a face to it.

‘Little runty guy, lived in one of the Hulme crescents? Strawberry mark down his right cheek?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

‘Sure you do. They found him lying on the bridge over the Medlock, just down from your office. Somebody had removed his strawberry mark with a sawn-off shotgun.’

I remembered now. It had happened about a year ago. I’d arrived at work one Tuesday morning to see yellow police tapes shutting off part of the street. Alexis had chased the story for a couple of days, but hadn’t got any further than the official line that Terry Spotto had been a small-time drug dealer. ‘That was about flyposting?’ I asked.

‘Terry was dealing crack but he decided he wanted a second profit centre,’ Dennis said, reminding me how expertly today’s intelligent villains have assimilated the language of business. ‘He started flyposting, only he didn’t have the nous to stay off other people’s patches or the muscle to take territory off them. He got warned a couple of times, but he paid no never mind to it. Since he wouldn’t take a telling, or a bit of a seeing to, somebody decided it was time to make an example. I don’t think anybody’s seriously tried to cut in since then. But it sounds like your lads have made the mistake of linking up with somebody who’s too new on the block to remember Terry Spotto.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Hell of a way of seeing off the competition. Dennis, I need to talk to somebody about this. Get the boys off the hook before this gets silly. Gimme a name.’

‘Denzel Williams,’ Dennis said. ‘Garibaldi’s. Mention my name.’

‘Thanks.’ I hadn’t been to Garibaldi’s, but I’d heard plenty about it. If I’d had to guess where to find someone I could talk to about so dodgy a game, that’s probably the place I’d have gone for.

‘Anything else?’

I shook my head. ‘Not in the way of business. Not unless you know somebody with a wad of cash to invest in a private-eye business.’

Dennis’s eyebrows lowered. ‘What’s Bill up to?’

I told him. Debbie tuned back in to the conversation and the subject kept us going for the remainder of the visit. By the time I’d dropped Debbie back at the house, I had a list of a dozen or so names that Dennis reckoned had the kind of money to hand that they could invest in the business. Somehow, I didn’t think I’d be following any of them up. I’m unpopular enough with the Old Bill as it is without becoming a money laundry for the Manchester Mafia.

Come five o’clock, I was parked down the street from Sell Phones. All I needed was a name and address on this pair of con merchants and I could hand the case over to the police as I’d already agreed with my clients. We had the names and addresses of nearly a dozen complainants, some of whom were bound to be capable of picking Will Allen or his female sidekick out of a line-up. I looked forward to handing the whole package over to Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice, head honcho of the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. It wasn’t exactly her bailiwick, but Della’s one of the tightknit group of women I call friends, and I trusted her not to screw it up. There are coppers who hate private enterprise so much they’d let a villain walk rather than let a PI take an ounce of credit for a collar. Della isn’t one of them. But before I could have the pleasure of nailing these cheap crooks, I had to attach names and addresses to them. And I was damned if they were going to defeat me two nights running.

This time I was ready for them. When Allen swung left down the hill, I was right behind him. I stayed in close touch as we threaded through back streets flanked by decaying mills half filled with struggling small businesses and vacant lots turned into car parks, across the Rochdale Road and the Oldham Road, emerging on Great Ancoats Street just south of the black glass facade of the old Daily Express Building. I slipped into the heavy traffic with just one car separating me from the silver Mazda, and stayed like that right across town, past the mail-order warehouses and through the council estates.